DESIGN.

An artful recovery

8 years of painstaking work restores 437 historic murals to city schools

February 02, 2003|By Rick Kogan.

Depending on where and when you meet Heather Becker, she will tell you that she is an art preservationist, a painter or a writer. But she's also a kind of private detective, specializing in missing murals.

This was not a job for which she applied. She stumbled into it one day in 1994 when her boss, Barry Bauman, who owns the Chicago Conservation Center, got a phone call from a Lane Technical High School teacher named Flora Doody. She had called the CCC because she was worried about the condition of one of the school's murals. Bauman went to take a look and decided he could save the mural. Then he wandered the halls of Lane Tech and found dozens of other murals.

He told Becker, who conducted her own inspection at the school. "It was amazing. There were 66 of them," she recalls. "I immediately thought, `I'll bet there are more.' "

After doing some research and teaming up with friend Mary Gray, who is the author of "A Guide to Chicago's Murals," Becker spent the next five years visiting schools, tracking down murals that dated back to the 1930s and the Works Progress Administration, a federal agency that funded public works.

When Becker would find a mural, Bauman would start restoring it. Their Mural Preservation Project, funded by $1.5 million from the Board of Education and the Public Building Commission, eventually grew to 437 murals in 68 schools, "the largest mural-preservation project in American history," Becker says.

The colorful tale is told in "Art for the People: The Rediscovery and Preservation of Progressive- and WPA-Era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904-1943." Published by Chronicle Books, it contains about 250 color photographs, some of which appear on the following pages.

There are also great stories in the book, such as the one Becker tells about Tilton Elementary on the West Side.

"I went hoping to find three murals that my research had indicated were there," Becker says. "The people at the school didn't know anything about them. But I started talking with one of the school's engineers who told me that yes, there had been some murals and that they had been whitewashed over the years and torn from the walls. I was feeling so depressed at this news when he said, 'I took them and I've been saving them all these years.' And there they were, stuck away in a storage room. It was so exciting."

Those murals were restored and reassembled, as were others that had been whitewashed and covered in years of dirt, grime, pollution and graffiti.

Contributors to the book include Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, the granddaughter of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who tackles the "Legacy of the New Deal," and author Studs Terkel, who takes us back to the WPA Theater Project. Renowned Chicago painter Ed Paschke makes an impassioned plea for arts funding, noting that the government-sponsored murals "offer a window into the soul of the people who created [them] and the time in which they created them. . . ."

Becker says she hopes the mural project inspires more arts-education programs. "When the kids watch the conservators cleaning and restoring these murals, you can see in their eyes such fascination. They all started to have pride in their schools. That's why the murals were painted in the first place, to allow students to walk through halls and be surrounded by masterpieces, following the notion that art could be nurturing and inspiring in so many powerful ways."